SK AI Data Center to become Koreas largest AI facility by 2027

seoul [South Korea]: Dozens of workers and five pieces of heavy equipment were intensively busy with foundation work at the SK AI Data Center construction site in Ulsan at the Ulsan Mipo Industrial Complex late last month, according to a report by Pulse, the English service of Maeil Business News Korea.

This facility is SK Group’s Artificial Intelligence Data Center and is currently being built in collaboration with Amazon Web Services. Although it is still under excavation, it will be the country’s largest AI-specific data center by 2027.

“The site covers more than 20,000 pyeong, and the completed building will be five stories above ground, reaching a height of 47.7 meters. When completed in 2027, SK AI Data Center Ulsan will be able to accommodate up to 60,000 graphics processing units, more than 60 times the capacity of SK Telecom Co.’s currently operating Haein cluster with approximately 1,000 GPUs,” the report said.

The main focus of this data center is cooling efficiency. Unlike traditional server data centers, this facility is designed to run not only CPUs but also GPUs and MPUs in parallel.

Since high-performance processors produce more than 10 times the heat and power consumption of CPU-based systems, building an entirely new cooling and power infrastructure was a top priority.

The report stated that SK introduced a hybrid cooling system that combines air and liquid cooling. The Ulsan data center uses direct liquid cooling technology, where coolant is circulated directly over the chips inside the servers.

The coolant comes into direct contact with heat-producing components such as GPUs and CPUs.

“The DLC method provides a stable training environment by precisely controlling chip temperatures,” a facility manager at SK ecoplant said in the report.

He added that SK leverages synergies among its subsidiaries to establish a reliable power supply network.

“AWS is also investing heavily in this project. Matt Garman, who recently took over as CEO of the US cloud giant, personally visited the Ulsan construction site to inspect the progress while attending the EC CEO Summit,” the report said. The statement was included.

This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to the text.